Let’s Wallow

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Heh heh. Suddenly I’m glad I don’t have a TV in my room yet. (Link via Silflay Hakra, who has a great collection of links to today’s pertinent comics and editorial cartoons.)

Flaggone!

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Whole Foods was giving out free American flags at the cashier, so I got one, brought it home, and taped it to my windowsill, where it proudly waved in the wind. But now the wind has just blown the whole flag away, and I can’t find where it flew off to.

I guess I’ll just have to express my patriotism by eating the stuff I bought at Whole Foods: red salsa, blue corn chips, and white milk.

Year After

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That evening (Manila time), I had just gotten home from work, and was feeding the stray cats outside my door, when my roommate told me that the WTC in New York had been hit by a plane. Like so many others, I initially dismissed it as a freak accident, and played a little more with the cats, until my brother texted me to say that it looked like terrorism.

I joined my roommates in front of the TV, just in time to see the second plane explode. After several minutes numbly watching CNN, I speculated that this was the kind of event that starts world wars.

I was up till 2am reading blogs, gathering quotes, and of course scraping what news I could from whatever sites still had the bandwidth to deliver. As I settled into bed, I admit, with some wry shame, that part of me awaited a pretrib Rapture.

I was not particularly shocked, awed, or amazed at the catastrophe — partly because of natural Filipino jadedness, I suppose, a result of the way our country is incessantly pummeled by manmade and natural disasters; and partly because of distance. It was, after all, happening on the other side of the world.

Today, a year later, I’m here, on this side. It’s a bright and clear day, and the a cool wind blows flags at half staff. I really don’t have any other perspective to offer — but I can point you to The Dane, who puts it in context quite well.

IE5/Mac and standards

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I don’t know why the gurus keep heaping praise on IE5/Mac’s “standards-compliance.” One must wonder what “standard” they had in mind when the browser absolutely insists on "text-align: left" even while the <div> class clearly says "text-align: center". Bottom-line is that many pages break in IE5/Mac and only there, when I know that my CSS is up to par. Mozilla gives me no such grief. Grrr.

“Okay, Murphy…”

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Work three weeks to redo the site design and backend, test it across every single browser there is, stay up till 3am uploading and debugging the thing, fret all day about how it’ll look for presentation at Digital Thesis Seminar class… And then, whoa, hey, the school’s internet connection is down today.

And on the eighth day, God said, “Okay, Murphy, you take over.”

Inbound from 2001-2002

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Changelog 9/10/2002

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a more refined style for the inside pages, with a lighter, more readable color scheme and less contrasty titles. Backend-wise, I’ve applied valuable OOP lessons to produce a more integrated PHP template class, eliminating the mile-long arguments which used to open each page using the old template functions.

The portfolio has likewise been refined, from its somewhat kludgy initial iteration, to something more thematically consistent with the rest of the site.

The guestbook is gone. I’ll probably replace it with a forum or perhaps a more interactive guestblog, when I have the time.

There’s still a lot of stuff I want to do: redo the mobile blog, tweak the blog menu, add a “recent referrers” script, get down to that “lab” section, a put in a search engine, maybe aim for Strict XHTML 1.1 validation, … but for now, I need to get to sleep. Of course, I haven’t swept up the mess; please tell me if any errors or problems appear. (I know the Trackback and Comments templates are still a bit troublesome.)

Shaken, stirred.

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I don’t know but that a broken heart is just part of life, and I suppose I am a stronger man for having experienced it. Though I’m not sure where this journey will finally lead, I walk it with my hand in His, and I know that He will never let go. Never.

Don’t ask. I won’t answer, except that it’ll all work out.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.